This is a theoretical examination of certain ways in which a child's development may be affected by parentchild interactions in which the content of television programming appears as an explicit referent, i.e., as the topic of a verbal exchange, as the premise for a game, and so forth. The discussion deals with four areas of development, viz.: (1) the child's interpretational skills with regard to the television medium; (2) the child's repertory of cognitive categories regarding the real world; (3) the child's behavioral repertory, including both verbal and nonverbal items; and (4) the child's social relation¬ships. The paper concludes with a discussion of certain methodological issues involved in the empirical examination of these matters.
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